Looks like KBin has an edge over Lemmy now in terms of monthly active users.
It’s obviously a pretty silly thing, and is not in any way indicative of which project is “better” or more “long-term viable” or anything — instances of both federate with one another, and with the rest of fedi, so it’s all one happy family.
That said, it’s notable. KBin is a relative newcomer to the “Reddit-like fedi instance” game, and also does not have the tankie baggage.
Anyway, the more, the merrier!
KBin: https://the-federation.info/platform/184
Lemmy: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
Discussion on fedi: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/110527049024028986
Just note that kbin.social currently has Cloudflare DDoS protection enabled which is breaking federation. Until this is removed, the communities are seperate.
Good to know, I was wondering why I couldn’t see any kbin stuff here
I’ve got my lemmy instance proxied through cloudflare. It can work if you make it work. It does take a page rule to get around some of the bot detection nonsense.
Thanks, I just made a test post and could not figure out why they were not in sync.
There are other instances, like https://fedia.io/ for example.
I am on both and kbin seems less active.
Perhaps the numbers are counted different?
lemmy might be counting people who have posted this month and kbin might be counting anyone who has visited the site.
Big respect to all the devs for handling this growth so well.
lemmy might be counting people who have posted this month and kbin might be counting anyone who has cisited the site.
The data is from The-Federation.info, and the idea is that the metric is about users whose accounts were active over the last month. I think “active” in both cases means “has logged in recently”.
Big respect to all the devs for handling this growth so well.
Absolutely. Sending all the hugs and good vibes, the Big Wave has not even started yet, I think.
yea, kbin is definitely less active
I think it mainly comes down to the project landing page being more friendly and the UI being more polished.
The landing page of join-lemmy.org doesn’t show what the website looks like. The only screenshots are of code and github. That section is geared towards potential instance administrators, not potential users.
This is great. It suddenly feels like the internet of 2003 again, with small communities popping up, competition and less of a corporate chokehold. Only this time they have a shared login and crosstalk, which was sorely lacking back then. If we are lucky this event might establish a stable, new part of the internet, which is separate from the consolidated platforms. The Fediverse doesn’t have to replace sites like reddit, just be a next step for people fed up with the corporate net (corponet?).
This is actually more like a return to the 90s of Usenet and mailing lists imho.
Maybe its just Nostalgia, but ill take that. Where you actually go to a place that has something to do with what your looking for, rather then a giant, centralized site where random people pop in, talk crap, and pop out.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking all day that’s it is like Usenet 2.0 in a way. Back when Usenet actually had enthusiast conversation happening on it.
That mstdn.social and the whole “lemmy = tankie” (whatever the fuck that means) is doing a disservice to the whole unreddit movement. I have seen plenty of discussion on reddit now of people not leaving because of these posts…
I did not say “lemmy = tankie”, I said Lemmy has certain tankie baggage, and that is in fact true. The developers are pretty clearly tankies, they also run a strictly tankie instance (Lemmygrad; many Lemmy instances do not federate with it).
Pretending this is not the case is not going to help in the long run. It might slow down the “unreddit” movement now, but I’d wager a bet it will make it more long-term viable and resilient, if people understand that choice of instance is important (there are quite a few great Lemmy instances that I would recommend wholeheartidly, like BeeHaw), and that there are alternative, independent implementations on Threadiverse (like Kbin).
Can you provide a source to your claim that lemmygrad is ran by Nutomic or Dessalines?
It used to be deployed on the same IP address as lemmy.ml. I don’t have the receipts. Take it or leave it.
Edit 2: another person expressing concerns (with receipts) about moderation policy on lemmy.ml
I will choose to leave it. Thank you.
No prob.
What I don’t get is, I don’t see how that’s a reason to be concerned about Lemmy when the whole point is that there’s no central control over instances, which literally anyone can spin up, and instances can communicate / ban each other as they please. It’s impossible for the politics of the creators to have any real effect on the software, by design. I feel like people aren’t grasping how this all works. If you’re concerned about their politics, just don’t use instances that align with those politics, even spin up your own if you’re really worried about it.
I do indeed use a Lemmy instance that is not aligned with tankie politics. That being said, I am also acutely aware that technology is political and developers of a given piece of software make decisions based on their personal politics, sometimes even without knowing it. So it is important, I feel, to be aware of that.
Technically speaking, you are completely right. The problem is that the negative association rubs off on the project regardless of the factual context. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether the political views of the developers influence the political direction of the software. The association that sticks is: Lemmy is the one with the Stalinist developer.
Exactly.
It’s analogous to the way that Reddit knowingly allowing some subs to exist repelled some users.
Most were able to get past it and simply not subscribe to subs they found objectionable, but I’m sure many people just stayed away once they learned that certain subs existed and were very much known about by Reddit admins.
One key difference here is the way that your instance is able to enforce rules and to some extent influence and filter your user experience, and that’s worth consideration too.
I’m also curious if and how an instance like lemmy.ml can, for example, delete comments, ban users, take down content in cases of cross-instance interaction. Could the admins of lemmy.ml, for example, ban a user from another instance from Lemmy completely? From their local communities? Could they remove that person’s comments? Can they prevent their own users from seeing content they don’t like on other instances? Can they moderate content from their users that is posted to communities on other instances?
It’s analogous to the way that Reddit knowingly allowing some subs to exist repelled some users.
Let’s be absolutely clear about that:
For years (2008-2011), Reddit hosted forums for pedophiles to share “legal” pictures of young girls for other pedophiles’ erotic entertainment.
For years, Reddit hosted forums for misogynistic men to encourage one another to perpetrate violence against women; for racists to promote and plan violence against black people; etc.
I can understand where mstdn.social is coming from and it is an “uneasy” situation. But the fact is that you have a choice here in which with whom you communicate.
The irony though of Reddit discussing to stay on Reddit and actually comply with the Autocratic leadership it has.
I don’t really care. I’m on Lemmy but fuck it, as long as it gets people off Reddit, competition can be a good thing in this space.
Metallica and Megadeth are historically successful bands, but Metallica would have never made it if Mustaine stayed.
competition can be a good thing in this space.
Absolutely, that’s why I am celebrating Kbin existing and being used.
Megadeth would have never made it either!
As I understand both make the greater platform bigger, more Kbin users means more Lemmy content as well.
Imagine competition being mutually beneficial!
Great news to me I’m not “pro-lemmy”, I am “anti-reddit”.
Same! I use a Lemmy instance myself. I’m just happy to see there is diversity in terms of software projects in the Threadiverse.
“Threadiverse” – i really like that :)
I wish I came up wit it myself! Sadly no, noticed it in a few threads over the last few days.
Humans are amazing.
I hope I just witnessed the beginning of something we’ll casually use in a few years.
Sorry guys, kbin is built on PHP.
If history has taught me anything - I would say that means that kbin will persist forever.
I mean, almost half of all the websites on the internet is built on WordPress, so maybe you’re onto something here…
I think people get way too caught up on technical optimisation issues with a language.
The reason a language, programming or otherwise, catches on is ultimately based on how many people use the language. So the lower the barrier to entry, they more people who will use it. PHP has a pretty low barrier to entry to creating a website (however simple/bad) and it has a lot of cultural momentum. I don’t see PHP going away anytime soon.
Yeah ‘built in $language’ literally only matters from the point of view of attracting volunteer devs, end users couldn’t care less as long as the platform works. Lemmy and Kbin could be written in Malbolge for all they cared as long as it loads properly and doesn’t annoy them.
While I wouldn’t start a new PHP project myself as it’s yet another language to juggle and not one I’m particularly interested in it’s a perfectly legitimate choice even in 2023.
Let’s not hate on tools. Php has its uses and has been proven to be useful in commercial applications. So has Rust. They are different but the choice of programming language means nothing for the core project.
I, too, can use a banana to hammer in a nail
hahah, this made me laugh. I will be stealing this from you.
To be a bit more verbose, I don’t think all programming languages are created equal, and its a disservice to pretend it is.
Duck Duck Go was written in Perl. GitHub (originally) in Ruby on Rails.
Languages are tools only because they’re general purpose programming languages. The real path to success is in choosing a tool that you’re good at using (no matter how blunt), rather than pretending all tools are equal.
Sure but dissing on languages you don’t like will only make devs who like those languages defensive. Not every dev is good only at languages you’re good at.
Yeah, I generally prefer kbin’s UI over lemmy’s but given the backend is in PHP I have concerns that it might not be able to scale effectively with its growth.
Not saying that PHP is a complete showstopper but there are valid concerns in terms of maintainability…
Can you explain this in simple terms for simple minds like mine? And I only ask for other people like me who may wonder but not ask
Modern PHP is supposed to be a decent language these days rather than a collection of footguns so I wouldn’t write it off out of hand. It wouldn’t be my first choice of language but it still runs huge swathes of the web, interesting choice for a greenfield project though. What it will mean is it’ll be harder for Kbin to attract developers on a voluntary basis I think, if I’m giving my time for free I’d personally much rather spend it writing Rust than PHP even if PHP is decent these days.
Urgh… php.
Rust or die…
Is php as bad as it wad previously?
No. It’s not perfect by any means but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of where it was.
Are there any sites in the Fediverse written in .net? I’d like to contribute to these sites, but I haven’t touched PHP in over a decade.
The cloudflare protection of their main instance is breaking federation right now, which is a bit annoying. I hope this will be resolved soon.
Just took a look at the stats on The-Federation.info and looks like Lemmy is doing just fine.
Lemmy Stats: 162 Nodes 90,053 Users 277,427 Posts 610,007 Comments
Kbin Stats: 7 Nodes 5,960 Users 3,992 Posts 4,844 Comments
I just noticed the same thing. I do not see a stat that shows kbin is overtaking lemmy.
Oh I am not saying it is not doing fine. I just found it super-interesting that a much younger project got ahead, even if perhaps only temporarily, as far as active users are concerned.
Honestly, many people are turned off by Lemmy tankies. I myself though I’d never come back to Lemmy until I found beehaw.
Honestly, many people are turned off by Lemmy tankies.
I keep hearing people commenting about that, but so far I haven’t noticed any particular tankie-ish influence.
Maybe I’m just not choosing the communities where they hang out?
The problem is lemmy.ml From what I get, a lot of the old guard (before the Reddit exodus) are talkies. That includes the admins and mods. And Lemmy.ml was or still is the biggest instance because people automatically choose the server of the Lemmy devs (Because many people don’t understand the concept of federation).
Would kbin’s current non-federation because of cloudflare stuff be stopping the-federation.info from accessing more recent stats?
I believe there was a post by a Kbin hoster that they had to set up a specifc rule in Cloudflare to get around the issue. Although AFAIK I would assume that Cloudflare could definitely be causing some issues for some instances which may not be set up correctly to get around the issue, which in turn could lead to the issue your suggesting. But then again don’t quote me on any of this I’m not a dev for any of the projects, and I’m basing this on my own projects where getting around Cloudflare to scrap data is a complete pain and sometimes more work then it’s worth.
I tried kbin but it currently slow as hell at least for me. It definitely is more inviting with its design though.
Any ideas what are the pros and cons of each option?
Lemmy is written in Rust, has been around for a while, and there are a bunch of established communities on established Lemmy instances already.
KBin is sadly PHP, relative newcomer, arguably better interface, and no baggage.
That’s all I got myself. Hope others will chip in.
Why is php a bad thing in this case? It seems like exactly the kind of application that php is well suited for. Plus there’s the maturity of php’s major frameworks. While I’m not saying Rust is necessarily bad for building web applications, it’s web frameworks must be less mature and battle tested. Plus, it seems like a lower bar to get community dev contributions for a php project than rust.
Well, to me Rust suggests that a given software project might be somewhat more performant, and somewhat more secure — but it all also depends on the developers, of course.
Well, that kind of sounds like the normal rust propaganda, don’t get me wrong, I do think the language is decent, it’s just tiring to see so many people just buying into and parroting some weird claims like “it’s rust, so it’s secure”
I like rust a lot, but it’s definitely in the place Go was a few years ago, where people just assume “written in rust” = good for some reason.
Exactly :) That’s what I mean as well, sure there are great things written in rust, but they are great because they are great, not because they are written in rust :)
I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally do not want to work with PHP ever again. I’m sure it’s gotten better, but when I last used it (>15 years ago), the standard library was super inconsistent and performance was pretty terrible. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and I now prefer client-side rendering.
But aside from my personal dislike for PHP, here is why I prefer client-side rendering:
- easier to have a solid caching strategy - means faster initial page load on mobile/slow connections
- performance issues are usually limited to database access
- you get the API for free for third party apps
- can separate frontend concerns from backend concerns, so it makes development a little easier to split into teams with different skill sets
That said, for a federated system, it doesn’t really matter that much since people can just increase the number of instances to help share the load. I just personally am not interested in helping with kbin, but I would be totally on board with helping with Lemmy.
Yeah, it shows you haven’t used php in a while. Most of the gripes people have with it have been fixed over the years, and every framework encourages you to build an API-first app these days.
That said, for a federated system, it doesn’t really matter that much since people can just increase the number of instances to help share the load.
This is only partially true. There is a finite number of people willing to run an instance, and increasing the costs associated with a given size of instance means that we need more of them, or that they may not find it worth the time to pay $X per month for hosting when it only fits so many people.
Federation is a beautiful thing, but we have some economic issues we have to reckon with.
Despite the tankie stuff I prefer the interface of Lemmy, though I have accounts on both. Love that they federate. Things are happening.
Agreed Lemmy is a lot cleaner IMO. I’d be all-in if it weren’t for the political baggage, even with federation we’re empowering these guys and giving them a bigger platform. l’m still uneasy about that.
I’m pretty uneasy about the association, but the attitude of Beehaw is the antithesis of it so I guess it balances out…?
I did play with Kbin first but the interface felt kinda broken to me, buttons not reacting and the like…
Tbh, it’s floss so I don’t care who’s working on it. I just don’t really get kbin ui myself, lemmy is far closer to reddit for me. If I wanted the microblogging I already have Mastodon so I don’t see why it’s trying to do both. I prefer the old unix philosophy myself.
Kbin just feels like a home project to my eyes. Hope it goes well and the federation will be absolutely amazing.
You can just block a community or user and you won’t see it. Main thing is that its not corporate owned
Federation also works between kbin and Lemmy so if you’re worried about that, the only solution is defederation from them.
I’ve been having a blast on Lemmy so far. Just had to unsub from the Brazil community because Brazil has a lot of tankies for some fucking reason.
I choose to believe Brazilians have dealt with fascists in their government for so long it’s all they want now.
Can I use kbin to read Lemmy content?
Yes. Check out the biggest currently active instance of Kbin, https://fedia.io/ — plenty of stuff from Lemmy instances.
What I don’t understand is why there are SO many missing comments when reading threads in one instance from another instance. For example, the top “Hot” post on Fedia right now is a post about community fragmentation on Lemmy. When viewed from Fedia, it has 8 comments, but when view within the source Lemmy instance, it has 40.
This is an issue I’ve seen in every instance on both Lemmy and KBin and it’s a huge issue. One of the main reasons I joined Beehaw. In fact, Beehaw shows more comments than even the NATIVE Lemmy instance, at 57!
“Tankie baggage?”
